


From Your Lips She Drew a Hallelujah

by Arukou



Series: Tumblr Archive [31]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bucky's baggage, Dark, F/M, Murder against minors, Nat's baggage, No actual sex, Sexual initiative taken by a minor, Violence against minors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 12:43:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7533229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arukou/pseuds/Arukou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Asset knows, but only when he is reminded.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Your Lips She Drew a Hallelujah

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://arukou-arukou.tumblr.com/post/133173184131/from-your-lips-she-drew-a-hallelujah).

He follows behind, blinking against the bright lights. It’s something about them that always makes him flinch when he first wakes. He couldn’t say what it is. Ahead, a man in a severe gray coat walks, sharp click-thunk of his boots against the concrete. Catalog: armed--two firearms, one at the hip, one in a shoulder holster. Catalog: 179 cm, approximately 53 years of age, heavily built, but more likely fat than muscle, easily downed, unlikely to rise before termination. Close-combat kill preferable.

“Here,” the officer says, stopping and pointing at a door. “You will train these ones. If any are worthy, bring them to me in a three months' time. You know what to do with the failures.”

Asset 17-2 nods and enters the room, listening to the heavy clang-snap of the door behind him. Before him are the recruits, all of them mere slips of shadow, barely more than fine china. If he were the kind of man to scoff, he would.

“Line up. Pair off. 1 and 2. Spar. Do not stop until I say.” He speaks in verbs and nouns and connective tissue only. There is no room in this world for flowery words. The girls speak this way too, and they step up. Two shadows move forward and it's vicious and cruel, a blinding fury of skin and nails and knives without even a word between them. Asset 17-2 watches and measures. He knows what he is looking for. “Stop,” he says finally, when they are bloody and black and purple and wheezing. “Next.”

So they go, down the line. Twenty-eight girls, sixteen matches, fifty-six skinned raw feet. When they’ve all finished, he calls out: “5, 9, 14, 21. Come.” They step forward and he studies them, steel boned, barely what he would call women. He snaps their necks efficiently and the others watch with blank faces.

These are the weak links, the fraying fabric that will unravel under too much pressure. They are not for the glorious future. He knows already who will be last, though he will still train them all. She is number 8, hair red as the star on his shoulder, eyes fierce and even more fathomless than the other porcelain warriors. She hides more than he even knows he’s lost.

Catalog: armed--six knives hidden on her person, all of them easily accessible. Catalog: 160 cm, approximate 17 years of age, lightly muscled but flexible and fast, incapacitate femur for most effective elimination in close combat. Distance kill preferable.

As he marks, though, he sees her marking, too. Her well-dark eyes are flicking over him, piecing the boogeyman against the stories she’s heard, the stories they’ve all heard. For a moment, he frowns, something in the back of his brain itching at him. He scratches the itch and a thought peels away: I wonder what she sees.

Blinking, he shakes his head. It doesn’t matter what she sees.

* * *

“You’re not what I expected.”

Asset 17-2 does not jump, but he feels the hairs on the back of his neck lift, the hackles of a wolf rising. He did not hear her. He _did not hear her_. Slowly he turns in his chair and looks at her slinking in the door, slight shoulders half-hidden in shadow. He does not speak.

“I thought you’d be…” she tilts her head curiously and raises one hawk-sharp hand to push her hair behind her ear “…bigger.”

He recognizes her posture. He’s had the training as well, though why he’s not quite sure. He is a scalpel slipped quietly between the ribs; he is not a poisonous flower placed in plain sight.

She glides into the room, silent as the devil himself, and closes the door behind her. “What are you doing?” he asks, staring at her swallowing eyes.

Catalog: Unarmed. Catalog: heart rate and breathing accelerated, perspiring, hands shaking.

“Teach me,” she says, and reaches up to pull at the buttons of her gray uniform. “I can make it worth your while.”

“Teach you what?” he says, and he doesn’t resist when she lifts his hand to her breast.

“Teach me how not to feel.”

The itch in his brain is fierce is loud is static is too much and he pulls his hand away. The words slip from his tongue before he can stop them: “I feel everything.” There is dampness in his eyes and he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t remember, there was no training, for the hard empty ache inside him.

She blinks at him and then slowly redoes her buttons. Her head is still tilted, like she’s trying to solve the puzzle of him, and all the while, the wet stinging water is trickling down his nose. After a moment she sits beside him and tucks herself beneath his metal arm. “So do I,” she says, and says nothing else.

* * *

It’s 2:30 AM when Bucky slips into the kitchen, rubbing at his red eyes and nose. There’s static in his brain, a memory rising to the surface like a snake shedding it’s skin, squeezed tight and dry and persistently itchy. So long as it doesn’t show its shape to him, he won’t be able to sleep. Staring around for a while, eyes unseeing, he eventually stumbles to the refrigerator and digs out some of Wilson’s beer.

Just as he straightens, the hair on the back of his neck rises and in that moment the static clears. He sees her in double, slight and hollow and dark-eyed in gray and tall and steely and Sphinx-faced in Captain America pajamas.

They stare at each other across Wilson’s dinner table, brushed by the soft light of the streetlights outside.

“Do you still feel everything?” he asks, the beer chill in his hand, still unopened.

She tilts her head, just the same as all those years ago, though now she lets her hair flop into her vision. “Every day,” she says finally.

He nods and dips into the refrigerator, drawing out a second beer. “Me too,” he says, and passes it to her.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://arukou-arukou.tumblr.com/) for more fanfiction and nerdery.


End file.
